About

I am currently a software engineer at Google. Before that I was a research scientist in the School of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I worked on large-scale machine learning infrastructure for natural language processing, scientific bibliometrics, and open peer review. I have a Ph.D. in Biophysics from UC Berkeley, where I worked on data analysis methods in environmental genomics (I was told that, as far as the biophysics program is concerned, “computation is a branch of physics”). I was involved in a couple of Bay Area startups back when that was unavoidable, but at least managed to avoid the successful ones. I have two decades of experience in scientific software development; I write code most of the time; and I'm happy to hold forth on many topics in computing. A certain level of cynicism—arising from comparing methods and results sections of journal papers with associated source code—has made me particularly passionate about systems for guaranteeing transparency and reproducibility in computational research. I play some instruments. I live in Northampton, MA with my wife, son, and two cats.

The opinions stated here are my own, not necessarily those of my current or past employers.